@Arantor said in WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else:
The days of having a graphics server in the hardware sense and desktops being kinda thin clients to it is old now, but that was what X was designed for - and I suspect Wayland and friends ignore all that. Even if it has some advantages (e.g. letting you access your machine from another without futzing around with VNC)
X is sort of backwards to what you say. The rendering is done locally, on the machine that you're at. The remote machine, where the application runs, sends drawing commands. If you were doing heavy graphics, you'd want the local machine to be beefy (and not a thin clienty thing). E.g. a silicon graphics workstation or so.
X terminology seems a bit backward in that sense. If you have two machines, local_desktop and remove_server, you run the X server on local_desktop. The X server handles drawing and displaying, so talking to your display, graphics card etc.. If you run an application on remote_server, you can make it connect to the X server. These days, you'd probably tunnel through SSH, but that's not necessary. In this example, the application on remote_server is the client. It sends commands to the server and receives data about events and so on in return.
OpenGL was originally designed towards this. Remote program would send OpenGL commands to your machine. Your machine would execute those commands, potentially on your local GPU. (It still works sort of, but shifting large amounts of data via the network or even just a local socket is not a good idea(tm), which is why stuff like direct rendering exists.)